Israeli early-stage startup Akeyless has banked a whopping $65 million in venture capital funding to build technology to help businesses manage credentials, certificates, keys and other secrets flowing through multi-cloud environments.

The $65 million Series B investment brings the total raised by Akeyless to $80 million and provides runway for the company’s ambitious plans in the secrets management space.

Akeyless said the new financing round was led by NGP Capital.  Early backers Team8 Capital and Jerusalem Venture Partners (JVP) also invested.

Based in Tel Aviv, Akeyless markets a Secrets Orchestration Platform that promises to unify multiple related use cases via a single product. The company’s technology offers secrets management, zero-trust access (PAM 2.0) and data protection (encryption, signing and KMS).

The company and its investors are betting on the growth of multi-cloud deployments and modern DevOps processes driving a massive need for tools to help businesses manage their most sensitive secrets (e.g. credentials, certificates, and keys).

[ READ: ’Secrets Sprawl’ Haunts Software Supply Chain Security ]

“Existing secrets management solutions don’t meet the current needs of enterprises,” Akeyless chief executive Oded Hareven said in statement announcing the new funding 

“Organizations are looking for an alternative to open source secret vaults — that are far from free when you consider the extensive maintenance requirements — and commercial solutions with high licensing costs that are difficult to deploy and use. Secret management should reduce the attack surface but existing solutions only increase it by creating additional infrastructure for teams to secure and maintain,” Hareven added.

He said Akeyless product can be used to centralize the management and security of secrets across multi-cloud and DevOps environments.   

Secrets sprawl has emerged as a glaring weakness in the software supply chain with valuable corporate secrets -- API keys, usernames and passwords, and security certificates -- regularly exposed in public corporate repositories.

The compromise of leaked secrets has been at the center of multiple supply-chain security compromises and there’s public data showing that a typical company with 400 developers would discover about 1,050 unique secrets leaking throughout its repositories and commits. 

By Ryan Naraine on Wed, 16 Nov 2022 15:50:41 +0000
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